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Google is luring publishers with a new YouTube and Google News integration that has Google driving traffic to their branded YouTube channels by exposing relevant videos across the Google News network.

Google News and YouTube will be integrating more tightly to deliver seamless blend of written and video news items, Google said today.

“Today we are inviting any professional news outlet that is already included as one of the 25,000+ sources in Google News to become an official partner on YouTube and more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News”

Existing Google News partners will need to apply to the YouTube Partner Program. Make sure to include your website in the “Company Web Site” field on the form to have your application approved. Once Google reviews your application, you’ll receive an email confirming whether you are included in the YouTube Partner Program. The Google News team will also do a separate review about including your YouTube videos in the Google News network. In addition, approved publishers will be given a chance to make money by opting into YouTube’s ad revenue sharing scheme. Publishers can also customize and brand their YouTube channels. (Disclosure: Geek.com is a YouTube Partner.)

The program also extends to individuals who maintain blogs and publish original videos on YouTube. Publishers of all sizes should enjoy benefits, like the preferential placement on the YouTube news page that hosts partner videos relevant to the top headlines appearing on Google News. This should directly boost the number of views of your videos detailed in YouTube’s analytics feature dubbed Insight. In order to have your news videos appear directly on the Google News site, make sure they’re marked as “embeddable” in YouTube.

Christian’s opinion:

This long overdue enhancement should help content creators hosting their news videos on YouTube build a larger audience. As those producing news for a living already know, people who use the popular aggregating service to get their dose of news headlines are generating millions of clicks each day. Previously, publishers were not able to directly include their YouTube news videos into the Google News database beyond having a video embedded into a written news item crawled by Google News.

Now, with their YouTube videos appearing alongside news items on Google News, users will get more diverse content and publishers get to grow their audience that now includes a combined YouTube and Google News users. As a result, awareness of publishers’ branded YouTube channels will go up, too. In addition, traffic drawn from the Google News site to publisher’s branded YouTube channels can be forwarded back to their sites. The only thing missing is a reverse recommendation engine, meaning Google News recommendations could appear alongside relevant videos in YouTube, thus driving traffic in both ways.

Coupled with several recent enhancements, like author search, the Google News service has undoubtedly become the ultimate online press clipping service. Many content creators, big and small alike, are publishing their videos for free on YouTube, cutting high bandwidth and hosting fees.